I've had the immense pleasure to convert an ASCII version of the NetBSD 
3.1 and 3.0.2 release announcements to DocBook/XML today. Juggling with 
all the nested lists became boring pretty fast, and so I remembered to use 
a different tool that I've learned the other day:

MoinMoin Wiki can do a DocBook export. I've it installed already, and so 
copied the ASCII version into it, fixed the markup and then did an export 
to DocBook.

As the document was all in 1 line, I had to push it through 'xmllint 
--format', but after that taking the relevant parts from what MoinMoin 
made into htdocs was just a matter of copy&paste. (The frame for the text 
was already done before).

This approach saved me from going insane tonight...

For more information, see http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DocBook


  - Hubert